


An Arranged Meeting

by walbergr



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Dominance, Established Relationship, F/M, First Time, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Third Person Limited, Relationship Negotiation, Restraints, Submission, pre-mini, unusual things about the BSG world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 17:38:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5057743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walbergr/pseuds/walbergr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even outside of wartime, you might be surprised by the pressures our service men and women are under. The most effective among them either have, or need a release valve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Arranged Meeting

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting, nearly done, in a folder for months. Finally now, seeing the light of day. Many thanks to LanaLucy for her beta, and her extremely valuable help in laying out the sections of this piece.

He wouldn’t say his ears are ringing, but there’s something vibrating just like that, his consciousness modulating on its axis. He feels drunk and lucid and like everything is siphoned out of him except his core essence. Liza doesn’t take him to Penelope, Penelope comes to him. He’s in the shower and unashamed and her beatific smile doesn’t even penetrate his skin.

After, clean in every way he can imagine, he’s walking, solid and agile, pivoting around other pedestrians calmly, not thinking, not being, just doing.

When he sees her, she’s in line at a cafe, pushing a hand through her hair, jeans and a black tee. She’s solid, real, human in a way he wishes he hadn’t seen, because it bolts him back onto the earth, straightens the ringing in his ears. Her hands are animated and lively as she orders, she’s beautiful and it makes him wonder what he’s done. What he’s doing, why he’s doing it.

The door to the cafe beckons him like her hand pulling words out of him, like a lover, and he wants to walk in, stand behind her, catch her eye, smile. But what would she think of him outside of the grey nondescript door he found her behind. The scaffolding of that afternoon, of her lithe hands skimming across his body, of the short, rigid words she breathed across him say no. And he listens, walks past, crosses the street.

That night, he calls Penelope’s answering service and gives her information about his next leave. Sighs, and ignores any regrets. He thinks about Artemis in her entirety so infrequently he lets himself believe that he doesn’t.

 

It took years to realize he was in love with her, and only moments to realize how right Penelope had been about the cryptic, terminology-laden world she’d created where people were pressure valves and tools and myth. The moment he saw Artemis in a blue t-shirt grinning as she opened her door, every frakking thing about Apollo collapsed under its own weight and Lee felt flayed to the bone. Suddenly he was a shell with no divisions inside where he could organize his warring instincts. When he was with Artemis, he was laying the foundations upon which it became second nature to recognize the slight twitches in his psyche that would make a decision firm, he accepted his wildness, his animal nature, confronted it so that he could rein it in more effectively.

With Artemis in front of him as a human being, as a woman with her own life, her own apartment, a boyfriend, he finds that he doesn't care about the fact that she's slept with his brother, or the fact that he may no longer be able to touch her, but somehow only that he had unconsciously built a constellation of her life over their acquaintance and that it was not only wrong, but woefully unimaginative.

He hands her the flowers he bought, and wishes they were anything other than daisies. They descend the stairs and both mumble inane, standard nice-to-meet-yous. As they reach the bottom of the stairs, she is so normal, so the opposite of her other self that he wonders as though in a dream if his brother’s Kara is in fact the same woman he has had screaming in orgasm. The moles he has memorized temper his doubts as he finds himself choking on desire for endless moments before Zak enters the room.

The calm control he feels in the cockpit bubbles through his veins like ice, and now he’s been removed from himself; he’s a series of circuits calibrated to make precise moves at exact moments. The words coming out of his mouth are not his own, he isn’t generating them, he’s only processing the situation and reacting as he knows he should.

But eventually the ice breaks and somehow it becomes easy. It's a different thing to be around her in civvies, to talk, to have Zak in the room and glancing at her with that so-Zak puppydog devotion, and she shifts from being his anchor to being a woman so subtly that when she taps his nose and offers him shots, it's the easiest thing in the world to follow her to the table and say yes. The hardest thing in the world comes later when he is crawling atop her and a wine glass shatters not only his illusions, but also (clearly) hers. She looks at him, eyes lucid and Artemis for the first time all night. "Ah, maybe not the best idea, huh?"

"Right," he says, crawling off her. "Just so we're clear, because of Zak, or because of..." Us? He doesn't have a noun for this thing.

"Both." She is sitting on the table now, a curious look on her face. "You know, I never thought easy and selfish would frak up normal so magnificently."

"No, me neither."

"So, we should probably come up with some sort of game plan, huh?"

"Yes."

Before he realizes, the words are out of his mouth. "When can I see you?" Her face falls, she looks around at her apartment, and suddenly he wonders what she gives up for every time he walks in the door at AMP, counts back and realizes that it's never been more than once a month, that she has an apartment and food to buy, and she had to budget her time and pleasure in a way he didn't imagine. "Coffee," he says before her face can get any more heartrending, "Dinner, maybe, just to talk.”

She blinks her eyes open at him. “I’m free tomorrow after class. 1700?”

“Sure.” He stands, rights his shirt and holds his hand out to her. “It was nice to meet you, Kara Thrace.”

She takes his hand. Her grip is firm and sends a thrill through him. “Likewise.”

 

When Lee was in war college, an instructor, a Major, had cryptically handed him a business card one afternoon on the heels of a theoretical discussion on the ethics of air-to-ground combat tactics. “You’re a bit of a rare breed among the officers here, Adama,” Major Montgomery had said, halting Lee’s departure from the classroom. “If you ever need some help balancing on the ledge between doing the right thing and just doing something, you should give this woman a call.” He slapped the plainly printed business card against the side of his hand. “Penelope. She’s a good resource.”

The words were cryptic enough that Lee’s recollection of the interaction the next day was only that it had been a compliment to get the woman’s number, and that he’d likely be remiss not to take advantage of it. Penelope, as it turned out, had an answering service, which hadn’t surprised him. And a price tag that had. But Major Montgomery had been one of the most effective CAGs in the Cylon wars, and Leland Adama respected the man, so he agreed to meet the enigmatic Penelope when her next opening came up, two weeks later, over lunch.

The restaurant was a quiet, padded establishment with a moderately priced menu and high-walled booths. He’d felt a bit like he should bring a notebook, like this was another iteration of the “Command Decisions Under Fire” seminar he’d attended five weeks prior.  He gave his name to the hostess, who led him to a darker corner of the restaurant and left him standing in front of a tall, slim, lovely woman with dark hair tightly pulled back. She had large, striking eyes, and a slit in her skirt nearly up to her hip. She stood, held out her hand, and clasped his firmly when he offered it. “Lee Adama, pleasure to meet you.”

“The pleasure is mine.” He said. “Penelope?”

“Penelope, yes.” She said, smiling as she sat down. “An affectation, as I suspect you’ve gathered, but an effective one.”

He sat across from her and picked up his menu. His eyes scanned the words and he wondered exactly how he had managed to, completely without intent, hire out the services of a prostitute.

“Major Montgomery gave you my information,” she asked, a statement that somehow also required an answer. Her slender hand reached out to take her water glass.

“Yes,” Lee replied, suddenly envisioning the Major in flagrante delicto with the woman in front of him. The Major, who sported a wedding ring, and had pictures of his two daughters engraved on the backs of his dogtags.  The compliment that Lee had been flush with two weeks before roiled in his stomach. Montgomery, a decorated war hero, a man he had viewed as having sound judgment, this.

His eyes stayed glued on the menu, and the woman’s hand reached out to tug it out of his hands. “At this point, you’re probably coming to a specific unfortunate and incorrect conclusion about both myself and the Major,” she said, and his eyes lifted to hers. “I’d suggest you give yourself a moment to think, and then tell me if you really believe that one of your teachers sent you to what I would say is probably quite an expensive whore for an experience that, did it exist, would be only slightly more enjoyable than taking home a woman you met in a bar.”

Lee hesitated, hackles rising, his eyes locked where his menu had been, and where now was the modestly low neckline of the woman’s dress. His eyes lifted, taking in her face: eyes a burning green, lips curved up indulgently. Then smiled himself.  “Fair point.”

“Good,” she replied, then flipped open a very small notebook and scratched into it with a pen. She was clearly allowing him a glimpse of the characters on the page, which he found unreadable.  “I use a personal shorthand,” she explained. “Your privacy is part of what you’re paying for.”

“And the other part?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out.” She was silent for a beat, continuing to make notes, then looked up at him again. “I provide a unique service.” Her pen was set on the table, her fingers trailing over the sides of her water glass. “Years ago, I worked as a psychologist for the Fleet. Even outside of wartime, you might be surprised by the pressures our service men and women are under. I quickly learned that the most effective among them either have, or need a release valve. For some, that’s violence, for some, it’s religion, and for some, it’s sex.”

Lee remained silent, uncertain where this was leading.

“What you’re paying me for, Lieutenant Adama, is to find, and facilitate, your release valve.” She took a sip of her water, and gestured toward his menu. “Are you ready to order?”

After ordering, watching the sway of the body moving away from the table, she continued. “What that looks like is different for different people. The first part is more or less talk therapy. Of course the word ‘therapy’ isn’t quite appropriate. The larger purpose is that I learn enough about you to discern what kind of release—” her voice with that word, took on a deep, sexual tenor that dipped tantalizingly into his spine and caused him to clench his jaw and straighten minutely. “—you need.”

He wasn’t looking at her, he noticed suddenly. He was looking at the brown leather to the right of her head, and it made him feel somehow foolish. This was a professional interaction. He was a Lieutenant in the Colonial Fleet, not a child. His eyes snapped to hers, reading that somehow, now, it was his turn to talk. He checked into the part of his brain that processed facts, and found two to tie together. “You make this all sound very above board.” A pause, no reaction from her. “So, why the pseudonym?”

A smile bloomed on her face, reminding him of an indulgent teacher. “It’s an element of how I work.” She sipped from her glass. “In essence, it’s valuable for myself, my clients, and other interested parties if I am more a myth and less a person.”

Lee tilted his head slightly, studying her face. It was more open than he had noticed when he sat down, and had a charming quality that put him at ease even as he recognized its constructed nature. The skill of the woman before him had revealed itself like a sunrise in the bare ten minutes they’d been sitting together. It was genius: the goods she was selling him felt more like a gift from the gods, a compliment from a superior officer, and the chance for freedom all at once. A genuine smile lit his face. “When do we start, and what’s it going to cost me?”

 

His Mark VII is in the storage bay of the cargo ship and he’s in the passenger compartment and the jet pulls at his tendons like a planetary mass. They’ll disembark at the transfer station A67 in the Cyrannus system and he’ll pick up a few stogies for Zak and the Old Man and take his mandatory four hours of rack time before continuing on the fifteen-hour flight with fuel stops on two battlestars between there and _Galactica_.

It had been a surprise to find that he was actually looking forward to the trip to _Galactica_. It had pushed off his leave by a week, which would have been annoying except that he would be seeing Zak, who would have otherwise been stationed on Aquarius for the next eight months and unreachable for anything but standard five minute relays.

And Kara will be there. He’s not sure if that’s a pro or a con. But he’ll have plenty of time to think during his flight. He buys her a cigar too.

 

It took several weeks of meeting to become more or less comfortable with the idea that Penelope was the only name he would know her by, but eventually it settled on her like a mantle. Their meetings were not as he imagined therapy would be. They felt more like debate, like sparring. It felt good.

It also felt strange. They met at coffee shops and restaurants, and paid for their meals separately. The viewpoints she fought were inconsistent week-to-week, and her attire seemed designed both to turn him on and to make him guilty about the same. It felt, in a way, like dating someone with multiple personalities.

Eight weeks into their acquaintance, her answering service called to schedule a meeting and gave him just an address. He arrived at a nondescript building, and the plaque for the suite he was headed for read “AMP, Inc.” He arrived at the door, knocked, and heard the snick of an automatic lock opening. The room behind the door he pushed open was empty except for a chair and a gym bag. He sat on the chair, unzipped the bag and rifled around inside. Boxing gear.

Eventually, Penelope opened the door. “You’ve probably already guessed, but we’re going to start moving past the talk part of this arrangement.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve brought you here to interface with another of my clients. There are a few preliminaries that we need to work through before that can happen. As I’ve mentioned, privacy is part of what you’re paying for. All my clients who meet each other use pseudonyms. Obviously for anonymity, but also because it’s valuable to remember that regardless of the interaction you have, it’s meant to be selfish. Whoever you meet, you are not friends, you are only tools.” Lee nods, reaches for the bag again. “Before you get ready, there are a few things you need to sign.” She hands him a clipboard. “You’ll see a rundown of the agreements on the first page. Feel free to read them.” She holds out a pen. “Would you like to claim a particular pseudonym?”

“Apollo,” he says instinctually.

“I work with other pilots, Mr. Adama. Let’s try to be more creative.”

“I already go by too many names. It’s Apollo.”

She smiles, tilts the side of her head toward the papers. “Sign those, gear up, and I’ll be back.”

He smiles too, and looks down at the papers. In comparison to the stack of papers he signed to enter the Fleet, it’s tiny, but it will take him time to read them. He skims. Signs the paper indicating he’s there of his own free will, that he won’t hold AMP, Inc. liable for any personal injury, that he consents to being observed, that he’s been told his confidentiality will be protected, and a singularly intimidating nondisclosure agreement which lays claim to not only his current assets but a hefty percentage of his future earnings should he violate it. He laughs at this one, signs and dates.

The woman who opens the door when he’s finished dressing is not Penelope. She is younger with a small, pointed face and deep red hair. She takes the clipboard, looks over the signatures and motions for him to follow. He tucks the boxing gloves under his arm. They wend silently through empty hallways. When they stop at a door, she opens it with a tap of a badge and does not follow him inside.

Inside, a woman at least ten years his senior is working a bag; she’s near his height with dark hair, sweats, a dark grey tank and a wide face that approaches being cut from ice. At the sound of the door, she slows her tempo, holds the bag to stop it swinging, and turns with what he can only think of as military precision. Her stride as she works her way toward him is meandering and feline. She pulls a glove off with her teeth and sticks out a hand. “Nike.”

“Apollo.”

She gestures toward the empty ring in the center of the room. “Shall we?” She’s already claiming a corner as her own while he climbs through the ropes. They tap gloves, and she comes at him fiercely. Adrenaline singes his nerves as he returns the volley of hits.

 

Afterward his body sports a number of bruises and abrasions. The same small redhead leads him to the head. When he emerges clean, his clothes are neatly folded on a bench. He dresses and after a moment, the door opens to Penelope. They too walk silently through yet more halls. Eventually she badges in through a door, and he finds himself in a neat, cozy office.

“You can sit wherever you like.”

He chooses a chair across from the desk. She sits behind the desk.

“How did you like Nike?” she asks.

“She’s a good boxer,” he says.

“How was the fight?”

“Fine,” he says.

Penelope nods, smiles slightly to herself and shakes her head slowly. “It’s sex.”

“Excuse me?”

“What you need. It’s sex. Or to be more precise, it’s the experience of losing control within a sexual situation.” His eyes widen slightly, and her smile follows suit. “I gather that’s a problem for you?”

“I suppose I didn’t think we’d come full circle.”

She laughs at this. “I’m not volunteering to have sex with you, Lee. I’m saying that knowledge is what we’ve been working toward. What I’ve been learning about you boils down to essentially this. The ability to lose control allows you to hold more tightly to control when it’s needed, when it’s difficult. It clears away doubt because it helps you reinforce what in you is affectation and what is immoveable. I told you that for some it’s religion, for some it’s fighting, and for some it’s sex. For most it’s sex, because for most people, sex is something they’ve had to keep under the tightest leash for the longest time.”

He says nothing.

“So this is where you decide what my role is for you going forward. You can walk out the door and forget about this very expensive experiment. I can give you some guidance to find a partner who will fulfill that role on your own. Or I can also do the work to pair you with someone whose personality and needs are a match to yours, with whom the process of catching the release valve will border on effortless.”

Lee looks around himself. “So this is a brothel?”

Penelope smiles at him indulgently, like a mother. “No.”

“But I’ll be paying for sex.”

Her mouth goes to a hard line, but her voice is even and practical. “You’ll be paying for my expertise and for my facilities. If you’re uncomfortable with either of those things, you’re free to decline.”

“So whomever this mythical woman I have sex with is, she won’t be in your employ?”

“No.” For a few minutes, they discuss what it will cost, and when he can expect to hear from her next. The next steps surprise him, and he walks out of the building with a grocery bag of pamphlets and porn.

 

She’s not in the rec room, so he goes searching for her elsewhere. Asks a few junior crew and eventually finds her lounging in her bunk. “Captain Thrace,” he says.

“Captain Adama,” she says, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed “Took you long enough.” She pats the blanket next to her. He sits, and her hand is on his thigh, moving just enough to keep reminding him it’s there.

“I didn’t even know if I’d come find you while I was aboard,” he says and her hand stills, returns to her lap.

“I’m glad you did.”

“Me too.”

“Nearly decked the XO this morning,” she says.

“Tigh?” But of course the answer is yes.

“He’d have had me out on my ass in the time it takes to check a box and sign a form.”

“The Commander wouldn’t…”

“You mean your father wouldn’t. You might have a slightly skewed perspective.”

“Fair.” He looks over at her, face tight, emotions close to the surface. “So, I’ve been thinking…”

She looks over at him, the little muscle in her jaw twitching in the way that tells him she’s anticipating something, and of course he knows what. He’s silent until she says “Yeah?”

“I may have been wrong about what I said last time I saw you.”

Her jaw is lax now and she pulls her lower lip into her mouth to chew at it. “So what do you want to do about that?”

“I guess,” he says, dropping a hand onto her thigh. “Whatever you want to do about it.”

She looks at the hatch, looks at him, a soft glow in her eyes. “Dog the hatch and we can start making up for lost time.”

When he’s back on the bed, she manages to tie his wrists to her storage shelf and calls it good enough.

They make the flyover, but barely.

 

It’s several months after the fight with Nike when he gets a call from Penelope’s answering service. He’s three weeks out from graduation and his first battlestar posting, and he’s wondered whether to call her before he goes off planet. He’s given a phone number and a time to call, and when the line picks up, he realizes he’s never spoken to her on the phone.

“I’d like you to try someone on for size. She boxes, so we’ll start with that. I just wanted to confirm that you’re still in before we schedule anything.”

“I am,” he says. “I was actually planning to call you. I’m being posted soon to the Battlestar Triton.”

“How soon?”

“Three weeks from Tuesday.”

“That’s plenty of time. How’s tomorrow afternoon for you, 4pm?”

“Works for me.”

“I hope you’ve been reviewing the material I gave you. Things might move quickly with this timeline.” The line goes dead.

Lee feels strange only about the fact that he doesn’t feel at all strange about the upcoming meeting. He’s had time to digest the idea that he’s essentially paying a matchmaker to find him a frakbuddy. Moreover, what did she call it, a pressure valve? But it feels superstitious, wrong, to say that whatever this is, it will change his life, even if the mystique around the whole experience has given him to that particular flight of fancy. Penelope is brilliant, an expert in human nature even, but she can’t possibly be that good. She is not divine, that’s only her pseudonym.

Even so, he hopes as he slips into his shorts, wraps his hands, pulls on his gloves, as the fey redhead he’s come to know as Liza ushers him into the boxing room. He hopes, and when he lays eyes on her, his hopes burst into flashes of light before his eyes, because she is beautiful and she is hard and if she is anything like she looks, with her stomach bare, abs flexing, turning into the bag, he will be lost in her within the week.

 

She is waiting for him when he slips through the door, a newer version of Liza closing it behind him. It’s been a while, her hair is longer, face slightly softer around the edges. She’s smiling, in her military-issued bra and briefs, lounging on a sofa, fingering a length of satin ribbon and her eyes snap up to meet his with her characteristic alacrity. She stands, sylph-like and she’s beside him, hands and then ribbon encircling his wrists, teeth in the meat of his shoulder, “I want you tied up,” she says.

“And?”

“And you’re going to watch as I frak myself.”

“And?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Okay,” he says, then with a short pause, “Ladon still work for you?” The safe word has been bandied about but never used, and he has to remind himself of what it is between times because she came up with it and it certainly fulfills the requirement of being a word that he won’t generally use during sex.

“Yes,” she says, but her back is turned at that point, and he knows that once they’ve agreed on the premises of their scene, he can’t touch her, but he’s already feral in his desperation. It’ll be better when she’s tied him up. Better and worse and just what he needs. “Take off your clothes,” she says, and sits down to watch.

 

Kara is stripping out of her flight suit after a CAP and he’s lounging because he has another few hours before he’s up for flight and the strip of her skin under her tanks turns him philosophical because he hasn’t touched her in almost a week and can’t make himself not want to, despite his best intentions. “Do you ever think about how calculating she must have been?”

“What?”

“Penelope. Do you ever think how many things she must have juggled to be successful at what she did.”

“Not really.”

He laughs. “Of course not. You wouldn’t, that’s why you’re you, and I’m me.”

“Insightful, Leland.”

“No, I mean, that’s why you took on the role you took, and vice versa.” She’s looking at him, and she’s aware completely of what he means. He gets flashes of rended skin and rope and he’s glad he’s already got his suit on because it’s already doing the work of hiding his erection from her. She’s silent for a minute, biting her lip, and the focus that brings to her mouth is just that much more fuel on the fire for him. “Do you think we were an unusual success?”

“What do you mean?”

He knows he’s on thin ice as he says: “I mean, she could have occasionally failed, could have got it wrong.”

“You mean do I think that Penelope divined that we were perfect for each other?” Her voice is a laugh and it cuts him in two pieces, because yes, maybe that is what he meant.

“I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I. Listen, I think Penelope frakked up with both of us—”

“Kara—”

“I don’t mean with putting us together. I mean with the whole situation. We were kids. I didn’t know shit about my place in the world and what was expected of me, and neither did you.”

“But Major Montgomery…”

“And Sergeant Karlisle too. It doesn’t make a difference, Lee. Both of them were career Fleet. I don’t know when they met her, but I doubt it was in flight school.”

He’s silent.

“The first time I met her, you know what she said? She said for some people it’s religion. If I’d been three years older, maybe it would have been religion for me. But I really liked sex at twenty. And I’m pretty sure you did too.”

“But…”

“Every fleet cadet is a prude, Lee. They pound it into you. I’m pretty sure they’d just gotten done pounding when I met her.”

She’s right, and he’s agog because he’s been thinking about this for what seems like forever, and never came up with that. His hands have been on the waist of his suit for the past half minute, and he’s not sure what he’s still doing there.

And then she says, “You know what, you were right before, before any of this happened. It was a bad idea.”

The center drops out of his world until she stands up and kisses him.

“It’s the end of the world, Lee, I don’t know if those rules apply anymore.”

 

He’s on edge, so close, when she unties his wrists, drops to her knees to untie his ankles and somewhere in between says, “Your turn,” as she centers her body before his, still on her knees. Because she knows what he likes, and knows what he’ll do, and she’s so right he feels compelled to rebel, to startle her, so instead of taking her mouth - Gods, her beautiful, lush mouth - he rubs his wrists momentarily and then circles around her.

“Put your hands on the wall,” he says, and she scoots forward on her knees until she can rest her hands against plaster. “I’m going to frak you from behind,” he says.

“And?” she replies.

“And you’re not going to move your hands.”

“And?”

He echoes the line back to her. “I haven’t decided yet.”

 

In the restaurant, she’s wearing tanks and BDUs and it’s just like the day before because it takes him longer than is reasonable to jolt himself out of the illusion of her; the pure volume of the experiences he’s had with her as Artemis pull him under. She doesn’t stand when he approaches, but looks up at him, keenly evaluating.

“I have to say, I would not have pegged you,” she says, and he’s about to tell her that she already has when her actual meaning comes through.

“Same,” he replies, “Honestly, I don’t know what I thought you’d be on the outside, but it was more desk than Viper. I guess I should have guessed, Ladon, a serpent.”

“You know your mythology,” she says.

“I looked it up.” And he feels his doubt about the meeting, his map of who she is dropping out of him, just like the day before, and she becomes more, a multi-faceted, gleaming, all-too-human woman. They talk about nothing and everything and it’s an hour later and they’ve eaten their food and ordered a third round of drinks. Walking in he had been prepared to tell her that he’d step back, walk out of her life and she could be with his brother and that would be fine but now it’s clear that it won’t be, that it’s not.

His time with her has been foundational, has enabled him to do more, has freed up space in his life to expand in other ways. But she’s not a slab of concrete and he’s tried to build up his barriers even more over the past twenty hours, but talking to her has pinged through the walls of glass like a pure note and shattered them. And with all of the pieces of his life in a melange around him the empty space she should occupy is clear to him.

So, when there’s a space of silence in their conversation, when she’s taking a sip of her ambrosia, he says, “So what are we going to do about this?”

She grins, rakish, so Artemis his heart takes two quick stutter steps inside him. “I don’t see why anything should change.”

He tilts his head and leans forward. She follows his lead. “I am not frakking my brother’s girlfriend,” he says, then leans back.

“Oh, I’ll break up with Zak.”

“And?” he says.

“And nothing changes.”

“I’d like to see you outside of AMP.”

She’s still leaned in, elbows on the table, and she crooks her finger at him so he approaches her again. Her voice is a singular note vibrating through him as she says, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I need this. It’s too important to me.”

She’s so stoic in her statement that he knows he can’t say anything to change her mind, so he doesn’t. Between them she’s always kept things tightly leashed, relishes the control, and he does too, but even more, he savors the ability to let go. And it’s clear as day that she does it because she needs an outlet to be able to do whatever she wants, needs to be able to push buttons and limits and come out clean and washed of sin and needing less to test the limits elsewhere. And she probably wouldn’t say it, but she’s afraid of the limits she’ll find with him when they’re not naked and panting and alight.

So he says, “Okay,” and drains the rest of his beer.

When he stands, she follows and reaches her hand across the table to clasp his. “When can I see you next?” she says, cheeky and cocky and beautiful.

“So this you do want to change?” he asks.

“When do you leave?”

He smirks. “Day after tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” she says.

“I’m with Zak all day.”

“Late?”

“Sure. Where?”

“You in a hotel?”

“My Mother’s.”

“I’ll book at the Azul Delphi. Say, 2230?”

“Sure.”

She smirks, reaches out and squeezes his arm.

He’ll be tired for the next four days, but he doesn't think he'll mind.

 

Afterward, he waits twenty minutes for Liza after showering, and when he sits down in the chair in Penelope's office, the savory, slightly acrid scent of Artemis' skin permeates the air around him, and another element of the process clicks into place. He wonders what she had to say about him, what Penelope asked, what happens next, because the only cogent though in his mind is 'Yes.'

The questions are largely the same as before. "How did you like Artemis?" and "How was the fight?" And he has no memory of what he says, but something about his responses, or hers, or the look in his eyes, or the absolute slaughter that is the lacerations around his shoulders and cheekbones must tell her something, because she says, "My office will be in touch with you for another appointment before you leave."

He feels, despite the obviously higher ground that Penelope holds, that he has won. Because the woman, Artemis, was his desires become flesh, was brutal and beautiful and harsh and explicit, and honed to a sharp edge with trills of humor and truth. And after seeing her grin tinged with the blood of a split lip and the sharp-edged gleam of a well-matched opponent, he can't wait to see that same mouth open and panting in anticipation of pleasure.

He sketches out every two-hour block of availability with Liza before leaving the building, and for the following week the expectation of their next meeting leaves him taut and pinging like the skin of a drum.

 

Zak, Lee and the Commander are having dinner in his quarters when the claxons go, when the call comes in, and when they hear what’s happened, Lee stands and says, “Is Starbuck your most senior pilot that’s not on the Valkyrie transfer wing?”

“Yes,” says the Commander, and the look on Zak’s face transforms from shock into a vector of shock and confusion. He hadn’t known Kara’s assignment, hadn’t known she was on board.

Lee sees his brother’s eyes flip from emotional to practical and then snap to their father. “Deck crew fully staffed?”

“Stolas shipped out two weeks ago; wouldn’t say no to an engineer.” Their father is standing, buttoning his jacket, heading toward the hatch. Once they’re through the door, the two younger men are sprinting, the Commander keeping a brisk pace toward the CIC.

Lee hits the senior pilot’s bunk room just as his father’s voice comes over the speaker system. “We have just received word…”

“Zak’s in the port flight pod getting ships together, who we got to fly them?” His hand is on her arm and her face is stoic and still as stone, her torso emerging from behind the curtain already shoving tanks on. Lee removes the hand. “You’re the CAG now, Thrace.”

Her eyes lock on him and she blinks, and then she rolls into action like a lava flow, words barking, hand yanking back two curtains, striding out the door, and as they dress and right themselves, the pilots in those bunks follow. They’re on the flight deck geared up within minutes, and then he’s in a viper, being pushed into a launch tube, and if this is the sort of efficiency she achieves by frakking him, he’s glad he said yes to her today of all days, because she is a marvel as she scrambles the pilots, and she’s a work of art in the sky.

He gives up trying to keep up and instead he takes her wing, chasing and following up and consuming the prey too small for her attention. He’s feeding off of her scraps and it feels good. She takes out two Raiders within ten seconds, both of whom had a solution on a viper. In the end they only lose one of the squadron before they land, before the ship jumps, before they begin to breathe again and realize, with a precipitateness no one on the ship had ever quite experienced before, that everything they know and love is gone.

She scrambles another set of pilots, sends them to the deck, grabs her clock and gives him a pointed glance as she exits the bunk. He follows a few moments later, watches as she keys open the CAG’s office and spins the hatch. He’s beside her, entering, as the hatch swings closed, and she turns on him, shoves him against the bulkhead, plunging against him, devouring his mouth, sliding against him. Then she pulls away and shakes out her shoulders, and she is Artemis. “I want you to tie me up,” she says.

He nods. “And?” The reaction seems incongruous with the setting, but she’s a psychological necessity to him, the ritual of their coupling holding him into the present moment on tenterhooks.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she replies, and her breath scrapes through her in a sob before she straightens her back and begins to strip her flight suit off.

He stops her with a hand to hers. “I’m going to tie you up.”

She says nothing for a moment, regulates her breaths. Then, “And?”

“My tongue, until you beg me to stop.”

“And?”

“Your mouth.”

“And?”

He says nothing.

By the end, tears are leaking out of the corners of both of their eyes, her alarm is flashing an hour and change until she’s back on duty. Her hands and legs are loosed.

They’re sitting side-by-side on the cot, not touching, and he thinks maybe this was a bad idea after all.

 

Somewhere, there is a bell sounding, there is a noise echoing through him and space is pulsating, glowing, dimming. He's everywhere, brimming with life, expanding through the universe, and then he's a pinprick, narrowing, nowhere. Time stretches out, spreading with fingers like blood pooling in a corridor, the viscera of a pilot settling in the crevices of a cockpit. He is there, that is him, blood, viscera, time.

And then, eventually, there is a bounce in the world, a slight alteration in the landscape, and part of him is above water. _Had he been in water?_ He's breathing, gasping, and it's sharp and it hurts. His eyes are open, his fingers scrambling, his heart beating too fast, too much, too hard. There are hands on his shoulders - he has shoulders. Something is pressing into the sides of his head, and he’s vibrating with the insensate impossibility of being alive, of this sensation, of the microcosm of the world dancing its needle-footed jig into his temples and he wants to scream but he can’t scream, can’t talk, can’t summon anything into being.

Then things still, calm, expand out again with the languor of taffy being pulled. And the sensation he feels is a tiny animal caressing his arm. And there’s a noise too, a purring, rhythmic but not regular. The distinct sounds begin to slowly peek through the murmuring hum, and he knows without pause that he’s a person, a human, alive. And as he bobs closer in from sea, his eyes open, and there’s Zak, saying nothing and everything in small words, meaningless words, a hand on his arm, thumb idly smoothing down hairs.

Lee tries to speak but only gets out a miniscule creaking noise. Even so, his brother’s eyes snap up to his face and the grin that appears there is nothing like he’s seen before, and Zak is “Oh Gods, Lee, oh my Gods, you’re, we were so, I’m, Lee.” He’s half standing, still grasping his brother’s arm, then in a subdued yell, “Doc, Ishay, he’s awake!” And Zak’s eyes are flickering between the curtain and Lee’s prone, immobile body on the cot like he’s unsure whether to move.

And with the flexibility of time, the doctor and the medic and his father are in the room and they’re swarming and he’s overwhelmed.

When the inevitable question comes up, “What happened?” the looks that pass between all four of the others in the room pull him short. Because maybe it’s that terrible.

“You ejected from the stealth fighter, Captain Adama. You were likely hit with some debris. You were in rough shape when the raptor brought you in.”

Then they’re all silent, and he knows he has to ask. “How long has it been?”

“Five days.”

And that doesn’t seem so bad until it hits him, but he can’t ask. Kara. The Admiral. He begins coughing and his arms are strapped to the bed, why are they strapped to the bed? He needs to move, needs to act, needs to do something.

And then she’s there, and everyone else takes three steps back from the bed as she approaches, and she circles him, sits in the seat Zak has vacated. Her hands are shaking as she grasps his hand, her head drops to his chest and she’s whispering the names of the gods like she knows them personally and each of them has given her a precious gift.

 

She knocks on the hotel door, tosses a duffel bag under the table in the entryway and slides past him. “Come back in ten minutes,” she says, barely looking at him. Her abstraction gives him free rein to drink in the sight of her before he obliges. She’s in BDUs and tanks, hair slicked back, eyes slightly sunken. She’s beautiful all the same, but the tension in her manner isn’t the bow-pulled string that shoots arrows of desire through him. It’s more like the a tendon stretched almost to breaking.

Outside the door he is tense too, pacing, running a hand through his hair, checking his watch. Ten minutes later on the dot, two cursory knocks, a key in the door, and he’s not sure what to expect. Her style, what she wants has always varied widely from one meeting to the next, and it seems even more so since they started meeting outside of AMP. Or maybe he’s just noticing more, sculpting the motives behind her actions, catching a look in her face or a posture in her shoulders that tells him she had a hard week, that she feels lonely or pushy or needy. He sees her more, so he has more points from which to trace her outline. Sometimes she’s a lion and sometimes she’s a continent and sometimes the only sense he can make of her is a web of tar, spread over the streets on a hot day, melting, sinking, gone.

When he opens the door, though, she looks more like a child, fist curled under her cheek, bag still under the table, a corner open with satin rope and darker detritus peeking out. She's naked, but there's nothing of the usual gravity to her bones, her lungs aren't pulling him toward her. She's soft and smooth and the hills and valleys of her convey her landscape more than she ever has in motion.

He flicks off the light, settles into the chair opposite her and thanks the street light for its glow as the sun sinks past the horizon. He wants to crawl into bed next to her, to feed off her heat like a baby chick, to smell her skin without sweat, without heat, without desire, to know something of her beyond the arcing electricity of her touch. But that feels like a violation, so he continues to sit. Eventually he nods off, and when the stretch of his neck and the light from the rising sun jostle him into waking, she is looking at him.

“Not quite what I had planned,” she says, an edge of sarcasm barely pulled over the faint lines of _I'm sorry_  and _don't look at me_  her grasp on the sheet and her downturned eyes telegraph.

They're so far off the script that when he stands, pulls his shirt over his head and settles his left knee next to her hip on the bed, it seems wholly natural to swing his other leg over her, to caress her face, her neck, her breast, her hip in one smooth movement. “Still game?” he says, and she pulls him toward her, wraps herself around him, darts her tongue into his mouth, and they devour one another.

Later, as she's gasping out, panting and moaning in pleasure, as her body quakes around him and he's careening through her, his cheek slides off hers and he realizes that she’s crying, emptying emotion silently onto the bed.

When she's fresh from the shower, pulling on her BDUs, he asks, “You been sleeping okay?”

She sneers at him, “Sorry to disappoint, Apollo.”

He shakes his head, “You didn't.” She's not looking at him, and all he can seem to do is look at her, see her. His throat tightens and the corners of his eyes prickle at the stagnant air in the room. He wants to say something to her, wants that moment back when they were sitting at her kitchen table, with his brother as a buffer, unable to fall back on Artemis and Apollo as shields, when they were just Kara and Lee, free of pretense and structure and supposition.

Looking at her, he knows she doesn't want that. Doesn't yearn for him as anything more than a body to slam up against, the whetstone to her blade, honing herself to an edge, to a point. But to what point?

 

When he raps his knuckles against the hatch to the ready room the look on her face is unique among those she generally wears: her eyes are wider at the corners, her lower lip pulled lightly in between her teeth.

“Reporting for duty,” he says, and she's in his arms, holding him as tightly as he's ever been held. He's pulling in breath past the nape of her neck and the scent of her envelops him like a miasma. Her hair is cropped close to her ears and he can't breathe for the cavern that's opened in his chest.

Eventually, she releases him, and his lips quirk as he raises his hand to a salute. “Customary greeting for a new CAG?” he asks.

“Well, it seemed more appropriate than a hand job,” she says. His head snaps toward her and she smirks. “Don't give yourself another concussion, Lee, it's a joke.”

But something in the way she pauses just barely more than normal tells him that no, it wasn't. “I'm off shift until my liaison with Redwing at 1600” he says, and he continues to stand at rest three feet from her. “Do you need anything before I go, Commander?”

She turns to him and purses her lips. “You have no idea, do you?”

“I guess I don't.”

Kara dips a hand into her pocket, pulls out a crisp, shiny piece of paper and hands it to him. In the photo, Cain is standing just inside a boxing ring, her brow and her clavicles are slick with sweat, knuckles bleeding, grin feral. Just at the corner of the photo, Liza is straightening a pile of towels. With the fey profile of Penelope's redheaded assistant, the rest of the photo, and the rest of the story snaps into sharp relief. Kara's hands are flat on the glass table in front of her, her fingers are clenching and her knuckles raise up just above the surface.

Of course, he'd known. He'd seen her there, buried under a different haircut and a mouthguard and out of context, Nike, the winged goddess of war, of victory. The name she would have chosen for herself even before the world had snapped out of existence around them, because her single honed point was the need to fight.

He makes a noise in his throat and her hands stay on the table but her mouth opens and words come ricocheting out. “Is this who we are? Is this who we wanted to be? She killed her XO for frak's sake, in the CIC, in front of her whole crew. Is that what I wanted?” She drags in air. “She excised the civilian fleet they came across. There are twenty seven men and women on this ship whose families she killed. Each and every one of them.” Her hands are still, her shoulders hunching into the table, eyes locked on her fingernails.

“I killed her, Lee. I did it. Because I thought that's what I needed to do, and I needed your strength to do it. You were right. You were always right. She frakked us up. I thought maybe it was good, in this world, that it was what was needed, but…” Her eyes are wide and her mouth is open just a bit, and her last words come out on a breath, on a sob. “You were right.”

And he's just standing there, like an idiot, not sure what to do or how to move. He reaches out to her.

“I can't do it anymore,” she says, flinching away from him. “I'm glad you're alive but I need you to stay away from me, Lee.”

“Kara,” he says, his voice as even and soothing as he can make it.  Her eyes are on him, slicing sharply through him like a thousand teeth. “You are not Helena Cain.”

“Oh, bravo Lee, poignant but trite. You don’t know who I am.”

“You’re wrong. I may be the only person who does.”

“Let me guess, precise? Good at my job? Smart? Am I getting close, how about strong?” She’s flushed and raging and he wants to bask in it like the sun, because the word he’d use to describe her before anything else is controlled. And the second is scared. Because the only place he has seen her truly let go is when one of them has been tied up by ropes or by dictate, when the only boundary she needs is a single word on the tip of his tongue or hers. Outside of those moments, she is laced tightly, even when she’s at her most sarcastic, even when she’s violent and mean and taking risks, there are parts of her that are locked away tightly, that she’s not willing to let go.

He comes around the table she’s levered against, leans against it facing the wall so that their hips are touching, her right shoulder to his right shoulder. He’s not sure whether to touch her, not sure what to say, but her lips still and her breaths are coming heavy and fast. “You hate rules unless you made them for yourself,” he says. “And you pretend you don’t have any, but you have more than almost anyone else I’ve met.”

Her head swings toward him, and her body is as still as space while her eyes search his. Then a smile opens her face like a book, Artemis again but out of context, and after all of it, she is still the most achingly beautiful thing he’s ever seen. The worry spills out of her and she laughs, a bubbling, joyful thing with edges of pain and wonder. She leans into him, rests her forehead on his, and one of her arms slides around his waist and the other toward his cheek and her smile stays open, so wide his cheeks too begin to ache.

 

There’s a robe in the room Liza drops him off in, and he’s not sure if he should disrobe completely or keep his boxers on underneath. The more conservative option seems safer, so he’s pleasantly surprised when he buzzes into the room and she’s completely naked as she examines hooks on the walls. As she turns, he sees that she’s sliding a thin chain between her fingers and she purses her lips slightly to the side before running her tongue predatorily across her bottom lip.

Then she sits down and starts talking and he can tell she did her homework. He imagines her reading the pamphlets Penelope gave him, wonders if she combined the practice with imagining him like he did her.

“...restraints, yes, spanking, yes, threats, no, blindfolds, no, I don’t want my head below my feet, I don’t want you to say anything demeaning, I’m fine with you leaving marks, but ask first. I’m going to say that I prefer to top or switch, but…” And her smile here is so open and raw and feral that it will be how he imagines her in between times for years. “We’ll see.” A short pause, then: “You?”

His list is much less complete, and by the end she’s stroking an index finger over the curve of her stomach and he’s regretting wearing his boxers and he grimaces as he presses the flat of his palm against his groin and says, “Safe word?”

“Ladon,” she says without a second of thought as she uncoils from the sofa and takes a tentative step toward him. “We good?”

“Ah, what do you want to do?”

“My mouth,” she says.

It seems anticlimactic after her list so he says “And?” Her little twist of a smile jolts through him.

“I’m going to tie you to the wall.”

He begins loosing the knot on his robe and her left hand is gesturing him for more so he says “And?”

“I’m not sure yet. Maybe I’ll give you a turn.”

She stops his hands before they reach the waistband of his boxers, and as she wraps them in handcuffs and hooks him to the wall, he’s quivering and hoping her mouth sets him off less rapidly in reality than it has in fantasy. Then soon enough, the lines between reality and fantasy blur and he’s melting ever so slowly into a truer version of himself.

 

Of all of the fantasies of being with Kara there has been one necessary element he has never relished: the moment when he has to tell his baby brother that he’s frakking his ex. Over the months since the end of the worlds, all three of them have grown together and intertwined in ways that aren’t always completely clear. He hopes that Zak will understand, will see, will maybe comprehend that something has changed.

But Lee also clearly remembers the crystalline, spinning moment on Kara’s kitchen table when his loyalty to his brother intersected so decisively with betrayal. That moment bounces off the other moments in the history of Artemis and Apollo in ways that uncomfortably jar and scramble Kara and Lee into a mussed pile of lies, omissions and exceptions.

But that’s what they have. And when he looks at her, when she smiles at him across the CIC or waves the back of her hand toward Colonel Shaw to brush off his paperwork, it seems fair and honest despite the mess.

Zak wends across the dance floor on their twelve hour pass on Cloud 9, and Lee’s throwing back two thirds of his drink.

His brother’s eyes are scanning the dance floor, and Lee can see the mental tick boxes above the women he wants to talk to. “This was a good idea,” he says, turning to Lee with a wide open smile. “Need a wingman? You’ve been pretty...”

“That’s actually…I wanted to to talk to you about that.”

“Okay…” Zak elongates the word and the smirk on his face is the same one he’d use when convincing Lee to give up on homework to play a game of triad during War College.

"I'm...well, Kara and I are kind of..."

His brother's face is quivering between a laugh and a frown, and he holds that edge for just long enough Lee begins to think it's cry more than laugh. Then he gives in to an indulgent grin and cuffs Lee across the shoulder. "I wondered how long it was going to take you two assholes to figure your shit out."

Lee's face has forgotten to control itself, eyes wide and jaw gaped open. "So you're not..."

Zak minutely tosses his head back and rolls his eyes widely, giving an overall impression of indulgence. "Oh come on, that was a long frakking time ago, Lee."

"Three years."

"What, do you want me to disapprove?"

"I was just...I guess I thought you'd..."

"Still be in love with her?" And then Zak's eyes close, a blink that lasts just a moment too long, and in that moment Lee sees himself echoed in his brother. Because the answer is obviously yes. Yes, he is in love with her, still. Yes, he wants her, still. Yes, he'd do whatever it took to get her back, if only he thought that there was something to do. Yes. But also, no. No, he won't eternally catapult himself against the rocky shore of Kara Thrace. No, he won't drown the smouldering embers of his brother's heart. No.

Then Zak laughs, just a single burst of laughter that humbles into a chuckle as he again looks out at the women arrayed before them, hips bobbing, wending through the crowd, drawing liquid down their throats through tiny straws. "Starbuck is not the only woman in this fleet," he says, and takes a hearty gulp of his beer. "And I still need a wingman."

And just like that, the conversation is over. And Lee knows it's his duty as Zak's brother to carry the centrifugal weight of this knowledge, to swing in a heady curve between his lover and his brother and to never, ever mention it again.

 

Three days after frakking her into the bed in his hotel room in the early morning hours, Lee hears from a pilot freshly off Delphi training base that Starbuck has been promoted to Captain and offered a position on _Galactica_. Scuttlebut is she's got command's attention and she's on the fast track toward DCAG on _Galactica_ and a posting as CAG when the ship's put to pasture. Two weeks later, he calls her apartment and the line is disconnected.

He's not sure how to call _Galactica_ for her and not catch his father, so he waits. Four months later, he's knocking on the nondescript door of room 324 in the Janus Inn just outside of Hypatia. The patrol arc of _Galactica_ and _Atlantia_ don't intersect, but he's near enough to Helios Alpha during her leave that he pulls some strings to get a forty-eight hour pass to meet her.

In the end it's her meteoric rise that rankles him. Not because he's jealous. He's squadron lead of the most effective squad on _Atlantia_ and he's gotten enough hints of his impending promotion that the months between them aren't at issue. It's that she's getting what she wanted out of this and every time he sees her it becomes more apparent that he never will.

What he wants swings back to him every night like a moon circling his orbit. There's a rawness in being with her that tells him all he knows is the remainder of her, the things that don't split cleanly into the job, the rules, and the life she thinks she needs to live. With him she is all of the things she's afraid to show. He gets to open these little drawers of her that hold her slices of scar tissue, of pain. He's the only one who's seen them. They're the only things he's seen. Those pieces of her gleam brighter and sharper than anyone he's ever known. But her face in sleep, the moments he's had with her as Kara and not as Artemis, let off a softer light that glows rather than slices.

He doesn't pretend to know what's best for her, doesn’t pretend he knows her whole shape, her every color, but whenever she opens one of those drawers, places these pieces of her in his hands, it breaks him open in a new way. He's constantly discovering bright new angles of anguish and obsession. He spends exponentially more time thinking about her than he does with her and this whole arrangement, the cascading folly of it is turning him into someone he doesn't like, doesn't want to be.

She opens the door and the smile on her face bolts into his baser self. He's gagging on his need for her. But he has experience with restraint and he holds himself back from it all long enough to say, "I can't do this anymore."

Puzzlement and denial stumble across her face in waves. "What?"

"I'm not doing this anymore, Kara."

Her mouth twists. He hasn't called her by her proper name anywhere but com relays since the night with Zak. The words that come out of her are a quiet, pure rage. "You don't get to make that choice."

"I do," he says, and her posture is a challenge, one that at any other time he'd take up with straps and sweat and sin. But this time he doesn't touch her. Her teeth are gritted, grinding, her neck tense, and he thinks he owes her an explanation so he says, "This isn't enough for me. I don't..." There aren't words, just a cascading symphony razing his neural pathways, pulling iron from his blood into his bones, packing him dense and stolid and immoveable. His next words are just that: ore, raw, brittle, unannealed, "This isn't all that we are, Kara. I'm done pretending it is."

Her stillness is pain, is breaking, and the only thing he wants from her is quivering below the surface, as though a step forward would slough off her husk and reveal the full spectrum of her. But he doesn't reach out, doesn't touch her. Because it's an illusion, a fantasy, and it has been all along.

The door closes in a hush behind him, and he leans against it just long enough to start breathing again.

 

Lee has been consistently impressed by Kara's XO. Colonel Shaw is efficient, precise and observant. So it's not such a surprise to him that one day as he's going over flight rosters and fuel rations with her she says, "I think the Commander would enjoy some time off ship."

Later, Kara’s voice cuts across his shoulders: "Kendra seems to think that I'm due a mandatory forty-eight hour leave." He's cross-referencing the next few days’ lineups on the display board with the roster Shaw signed. The Pilot's ready room is empty, and he's pleasantly disarmed when he turns to see her with her jacket unbuttoned and a knee bent so her foot rests on the chair. "I noticed you're up for a pass starting at 1900 today."

"Oh, yeah, thought I'd mentioned."

"This some sort of mutiny, Major?"

"Apparently," he says, and takes long steps toward her. "On your feet, Thrace."

Her smirk borders on coquettish as she stands, leaning forward so her breasts brush against his chest. "I snagged a room on Cloud Nine." She leans forward, nearly whispering, a hand brushing over his hip bone, lower. "Thought you might want to join me."

His shoulder is against hers, lips edging toward the side of her neck. "I'm still on duty, Commander."

And now her smile is rakish, feral. "I wouldn't mind a little dereliction of duty just about now."

"Hatch is open."

"Live a little."

His mouth makes its way to her neck, fingers brush a few key points on her skin and she's flush, panting. He pulls away, turns back to the whiteboard. “I’ll see you at 1930, then?”

She grins. “You frakker.”

“I take my job seriously, Commander.”

She stands, walks towards the door. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

 

She’s perched atop him, elbows splayed between his shoulders, staring down, when she says, “I want to fly with you again.”

Anyone but a pilot would miss the charge in her eyes, would interpret her words as innuendo, but they’ve always been straightforward about sex. Discussing in advance, agreeing on the parameters leaves little room for hedging your language.

He skims his lips across her neck. “I’ll have to ask the Admiral.”

“You do that.” She shimmies her hips to the side, nestles in next to his warmth, head tucked into the crevasse between his shoulder and his chest. She kisses him as she’s been doing more and more in the past few weeks: soft and warm and tender. Her eyes are bordering on sleep and she breathes, “I love you.”

His breath catches, holds, releases. He echoes the words back.

**Author's Note:**

> While I tried to approach the topic of submission and domination with sensitivity and respect in this piece, I may have gotten things wrong.


End file.
